In this photo provided by Walt Disney Pictures, As the Maya kingdom faces its decline, the rulers insist the key to prosperity is to build more temples and offer human sacrifices. Jaguar Paw (Rudy Youngblood), a young man chosen for sacrifice, flees the kingdom to avoid his fate in "Apocalypto."
(Photo Credit: Andrew Cooper/AP Photo/Walt Disney Pictures) Copyright: Icon Distribution, Inc., All rights reserved less

In this photo provided by Walt Disney Pictures, As the Maya kingdom faces its decline, the rulers insist the key to prosperity is to build more temples and offer human sacrifices. Jaguar Paw (Rudy Youngblood), ... more

Apocalypto: Action drama. Starring Rudy Youngblood, Morris Birdyellowhead and Dalia Hernandez. Directed by Mel Gibson. (R. 135 minutes. At Bay Area theaters. In Mayan with English subtitles. For complete movie listings and show times, and to buy tickets for select theaters, go to sfgate.com/movies.)

By now, it's fair to say that Mel Gibson does not make boring movies. He does, however, make movies that make you a little worried about him, and "Apocalypto" might be the ultimate exemplar of the Gibson style. It's a bloodbath, of course, but to say that isn't enough. Scorsese movies can be a bloodbath, but would Scorsese ever show you a man eating the raw testicles of a wild boar within the first five minutes of screen time? And what about the running motif of beating hearts yanked from living bodies? No, for those excesses one can only turn to Mel.

In any discussion of "Apocalypto," which deals with the twilight of Mayan civilization, a delicate distinction must be made. It would be inappropriate and probably inaccurate for any critic to pronounce on the mental health of a filmmaker based on his movie. Yet no description of "Apocalypto" can even begin, much less be complete, without noting -- say, in a colloquial, nonclinical, anecdotal sort of way -- that it seems like something made by a crazy person. It's unrelenting, a succession of blood-soaked disaster, an artfully designed parade of cruelty that would make the Marquis de Sade get up and say, "Enough already."

The mission seems to have been to show cruelty, and then a justification was found for it. And so at the beginning we get a quote from Will Durant: "A great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself from within." Aha! So that's Gibson's purpose in showing one Mayan tribe attacking, raping, enslaving, torturing, bludgeoning, stabbing, spearing, impaling, eviscerating, dissecting and decapitating the other! It's a cautionary tale.

According to Gibson, the Spanish defeated the Mayans because they had become divided and decadent. And here I thought it had something to do with disease and the fact that the Spanish had things like, you know, guns. Yet "Apocalypto" has to be respected for the sheer audacity of it, for the commitment and ambition behind it, and for its presentation of a complete other world. It is the furthest thing from a cynical or casual piece of work. It's crazy, and it moves. Everything bad that can happen happens, and when it doesn't, that's only because something even worse happens -- and in this way, it keeps a hold on an audience's attention.

To see "Apocalypto" is to come away feeling as though you really have watched, for example, an ancient decapitation rite, with each head rolling down an immense staircase toward a cheering, bloodthirsty throng. Whether you actually want to see this is up to you, but you've never seen anything like it before and almost certainly never will again.

As in "The Passion of the Christ," "Apocalypto" is filmed in the original language of the era, in this case Mayan, and as was the case with "The Passion," this has a positive effect on the actors, liberating them from having to act stiff in order to suggest the remoteness of the era and the culture. Instead, the culture is embodied in the language, and the actors are free to behave naturally. The naturalness is charming in an early sequence, in which we get a glimpse of peaceful Mayan life, with young family man Jaguar Paw (Rudy Youngblood) coming home to his beautiful pregnant wife and his young son. But as in "Braveheart," the happy domestic interlude is really there only to make the slaughter feel personal.

Jaguar Paw is one of a handful of young Mayan hunters who are introduced at the start, but he gradually emerges as the film's locus. During an attack on his village, he successfully hides his family inside a dry well, and once he's captured, he has to figure out a way to make his way back so that he can rescue them. Along the way, we see mainly through his eyes the hardships inflicted by the rival tribe. The enemy's town square, in which people gather to buy slaves at auction, is a decadent spectacle of biblical proportions, with images of greed, larceny and gluttony everywhere. It's tempting to see this as Gibson's vision of the world, as evil, treacherous and heedless.

The disrespect for life itself constitutes the ultimate decadence, and that's on display in the aforementioned decapitation rite, which in terms of scale is like something out of Griffith's "Intolerance." The onscreen crowd's screaming affection for blood-sport rituals, of the kind in which Gibson specializes, is offered up as evidence that their culture is heading into the abyss. Hmm. Maybe Gibson has a point.

-- Advisory: This film contains nudity, decapitations, forced sex, throat cuttings, arrows in the neck, arrows through the mouth and a scene in which a jaguar bites into a man's head. Sensitive viewers may find some of this disturbing.